Tell Us What Inspired Your Story- Seven Days of Questions for the authors of “Owned by the Alpha: Manlove Edition”

Because I like to talk about my writing I assume others like to talk about their writing to. In this spirit, I forced my lovely co-authors in Owned by the Alpha to answer a bunch of questions about how they got from the blank page to this book.

Question 4: Tell Us What Inspired Your Story?

Is there a magical idea farm where all the sexy man-beasts hang out and wait to inspire you? Can I get tickets to watch?

Two things inspired this story. One, my vision board for this year—my theme is “Take risks”, so I did. And two, I made a Spotify song list for Mooncrest. The songs “All That Matters” by Colton Dixon (no relation to me, just happy accident) and “Standing Here in Front of Me” by David Mead helped me examine the story and go deeper into the characters. How would I feel if my true love was just over a fence and he ignored me for years? What if I found out the one for me had been waiting and yearning for me, his heart almost stopping beating for fear of never being mine? That crushing pain on both sides was what I attempted to pull out. I hope I did the story justice. And Saber and Kace and their love will appear in future stories as well.

The Evernight submission call prompt lit the fuse and my two gorgeous inspirations Brodie Beaudry and Harvey Newton-Hayden) took care of the rest. Waretown had been a setting I wanted to use for some time, but nothing ever fit until His Guardian Panther.

I love Evernight Anthologies; I’ve been reading them a lot longer than I’ve been writing for them so I make it a point now to submit to each. I really struggled to figure out what I was going to write for this one. Now I have something like eight half finished novels about shifters both M/M and F/M. “The Scarf” eventually came about when I caught pneumonia and binged on modern Disney films (I’m in deep love with the cartoon fox from Zooptopia and I’m not ashamed) then when I couldn’t keep my eyes open listened to Suspense! audioplays. When I regained consciousness, I had the idea of a bad-ass fox hiding refugee animals.

As a pantser, that’s a hard question to answer. I really liked the sound of the anthology call. But I had no idea what direction the story could take when I first sat down and thought about it. Firstly, the occupations came to mind, then the types of shifters I wanted, and then the way the story would unfold.

Owned by the Alpha, the anthology title. The second I read it I sat down at my computer and started thinking about a short shifter story that I really wanted to tell. In an hour, I had an outlined planned and Last Alpha Standing was born. (And no, I wasn’t wearing pants. It’s kind of my thing, lol.)

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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. –Oscar Wilde

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